Interact Expo At Capital Factory: Crowdery Interview [video][sxsw]

It’s standing room only, for the second time in the last 12 hours, here at the capital factory in downtown Austin Texas. Last night The Capital Factory was one of the hosts for the ATX Startup Crawl. Today, they’ve teamed up with Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) to host the InteractExpo.

This event is showcasing the best of the best in early stage startups, really from across the country.

The first startup we caught up with is Crowdery.

Crowdery is a Dallas based startup that is big data disguised as what the cofounder Aditya Viswanathan calls “Hot or Not meets Groupon”.

His innovative platform allows ordinary customers of brands to engage with them by helping to select the next product. If the consumer votes for the product that actually gets released they get to purchase it at a discount.

The retailers and manufacturers get access to mountains of useful customer data that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in focus groups.

Check out the video interview with Viswanathan below and for more info visit Crowdery.com

EdTech Startup MatchBox Lets Colleges Manage Applications On An iPad, SXSWedu Pitch Video

Stephen Marcus, the founder and CEO of Matchbox has created a product that colleges and universities are quickly adopting and loving. Matchbox is a complete solution that allows admissions staff to manage the applications process via an ipad app.

“For us, using Matchbox was a no brainer,” said Sundar Kumarasamy, vice president for enrollment management and marketing at the University of Dayton, in a prepared statement released by the company. “Matchbox provides us with an intuitive solution that empowers our readers to give each applicant the critical attention they deserve while saving us countless hours in the process.” EdTech times reported last July.

Matchbox and their new and innovative way to handle admissions, made it to the finals in the higher ed category at the LAUNCHedu startup showdown as part of SXSWedu earlier this week.

Although SpeakingPal was the ultimate winner in the HigherEd category, Mathbox still beat out 10 other high caliber startups targeting college students and educators.

Check out their pitch video from the finals on Wednesday afternoon. For more info on Matchbox and how it can help your admissions process, visit matchbox.net.

Check out more of our SXSW 2013 coverage here

Baltimore Startup Common Curriculum Has Disrupted Curriculum Writing [SXSW]

Teachers write between 200-800 lesson plans per year based on how many unique courses they teach. This was a major pain point for educators. Often times they would want to take one lesson and take part of it and incorporate it into another. This would be great if they could easily put their hands on that file.

In 2009 Baltimore math teacher Scott Messinger became fed up with the old way of planning curriculum. EdTech was poppin up everywhere at the student level, yet teachers were still writing lesson plans in Microsoft Word, or the old fashioned way, by hand.

Messinger taught himself to code over the next three years and started building what became Common Curriculum. According to whatweekly, in 2011 Robbie Earle joined Messinger as co-founder, after Education Hack Day.

They launched Common Curriculum back in August and this week they were a finalist at LAUNCHedu as part of SXSWedu.

We got a chance to catch up with Earle. Check out our video interview below.

Check out more of our SXSW 2013 Coverage here at nibletz.com

We Kicked Off The SXSW ATX Startup Crawl At Ordoro (Video) [SXSW]

Ordoro is an e-commerce business owners dream. Their suite of tools to help e-commerce professionals who actually ship products help save time and increase the bottom line.

Nibletz co-founder and CEO Nick Tippmann, owned an e-commerce business as a junior and senior in high school that made over six figures in his senior year, not too shabby for selling electronics out of his parent garage. When we first arrived at Ordoro and found out what they were all about Tippmann admitted he really could have used that in the early part of the 2000s.

The Austin based startup raised $1.2 million dollars in a Series A round last summer. A huge feat for a startup that was passed up for Capital Factory. Austinstartup.com reports that it’s no loss though because Capital Factory founders Joshua Baer and Bill Boebel participated in the round.

We started our trek on the ATX SXSW Startup Crawl at Ordoro and it was a pleasure meeting co-founders Jag Narayan and Naruby Schlenker. Schlenker took a few minutes with us to tell us all about Ordoro and how to say it like an Italian.

Check out the video below and for more visit ordoro.com

We’ve got a ton of SXSW 2013 coverage here.

Clever Wins The K-12 Category At LAUNCHedu, SXSWedu With This Pitch

Clever, a platform that connects educational software providers with legacy Student Information Systems, has already caught the eye of major venture capitalists. Back in October, after completing the summer round at Y-Combinator, they raised $3 million dollars from some of the tech world’s elite venture capitalists including SVAngels, Google Ventures, Bessemer and Mitch Kapor of Kapor Capital.

While getting into Y-Combinator, graduating and raising a big round of funding are all great, Wednesday night at SXSWedu they were crowned K-12 champions of the LAUNCHedu startup showdown. This award is better than your average pitch competition because it’s an award from their peers and their user base, educators.

What began as a simple idea for a simple, yet aggravating problem, eventually prompted founders Dan Carroll, Tyler Bosmeny and Rafael Garcia to quit their jobs and pursue this opportunity full time. Another startup called LearnSprout is attacking the same problem, and a Startup Weekend EDU startup, Student Dash, attempted it but had to abandon the project because founder Kevin Tame didn’t have time to continue. Tame was featured in the recent Startup Weekend EDU movie.

Clever has already received major traction and is building scale at a quick rate. Carroll said in his Wednesday pitch that the startup had already been deployed in 3,000 schools and has over 1 million student users. They also have over 40 paying app customers who pay them to access their platform.

Check out Carroll’s winning pitch video below:

More SXSW 2013 coverage here at nibletz.com

EdTech Startup SpeakingPal Pitches At LAUNCHedu Part Of SXSWedu [sxsw]

Nowadays people don’t have time for long tail language speaking courses like Rosetta Stone. Not only that but most courses, like Rosetta Stone, teach their students in just about the same manner you would learn a foreign language in high school.

SpeakingPal, an Israeli startup, is actually more successful because the platform teaches English in a more natural format.

SpeakingPal is a web based platform and also a mobile app platform that let’s the user engage with video content and actually have a “conversation” with the virtual instructor.

The guys at SpeakingPal actually ended up winning the highered category at LAUNCHedu as part of SXSWedu.

Check out their pitch below:

Check out more of our SXSW13

coverage here

Chicago EdTech Startup ThinkCerca Pitches At SXSWedu

ThinkCerca,Chicago startup,EdTech,startup,startups,starup video

ThinkCera founder Eileen Murphy Buckley pitches at SXSWedu (photo: NMI 2013)

50 years ago, a student challenging a teacher would be cause for a good paddle beating or wrapping on the students fingers with a ruler. Today, not so much.

Argumentation is now at the core of the new Common Core State Standards, and distinguished Chicago educator, Eileen Murphy Buckley, understands that with a passion. As the former Director of Curriculum and Instruction for over 100 Chicago Public Schools, Buckley oversaw the implementation of this kind of curriculum system wide.

Now she’s turned these important fundamentals into ThinkCerca a platform that helps build students critical thinking ability.

With argumentation we’re not talking abut back talking the teacher, Buckley and progressive educators worldwide are teaching students how to create valid arguments about everything built on five principles; claim, evidence, reasoning, counter argument and audience.

“ThinkCERCA is harnessing the unique combination of deep subject area knowledge, hard-earned, pedagogical design skill, and research-based expertise to build a marketplace that will give school districts economic access to the world’s largest selection of high quality literacy lessons. Unlike a the limited selection available in a static textbook, our dynamic marketplace will offer a distribution channel for expert teachers to refresh and deepen the lesson library in ways that both students and teachers find valuable.” Buckley wrote in a guest post to Chicago based Technori.

ThinkCera made it to the final round in the LAUNCHedu startup showdown as part of SXSWedu in the K-12 category.

Check out their pitch below:

SXSW team coverage from nibletz.com can be found here.

instaGrok Is A New Way To Learn, And It Works! SXSWedu Video Interview

When I first sat down with Andrew Bender, President and CEO of instaGrok I was mesmerized at what I saw. I originally though that a “research engine” would be boring, or at best a fancy way to say search engine, and Google has determined we don’t need anymore of those.

Once Bender took me through a demo I wished that instaGrok was around when I was in school. I told Bender that I am a very visual person. I “white board” just about everything, drawing webs, flowcharts and arrows all over the place. Well instaGrok takes whatever your researching and visually shows the user how things are connected.

Bender showed me two examples. The first was gravity. As you can see from the grok above gravity is connected to Einstein, equation, orbit, object, universe, scientists, force, astronaut, and Newton. When you’re on the instaGrok site if you click on any of the circles another web appears showing how the connections are connected to other things.

On the right side bar instaGrok connects the user to key facts, websites, videos, images, quizzes and a glossary. Now the user is connected to mountains worth of research in a very easy to understand and navigate UI. If a user was actually working on a research paper about gravity they could pin anything from the right hand columns directly into the grok.

The other topic we looked at was “Brown v Brown” and a user built grok. This grok features a bunch of links that the creator has added, or pinned, to it with the information they need.

You don’t need to register for instaGrok, but if you do you can save the groks you create for as long as you would like.

We got a chance to interview Bender at the LAUNCHedu showcase as part of SXSWedu. Check out the video interview below:

Check out instaGrok here

Here’s more of our SXSW13 coverage at nibletz.com

Flinja The Place To Find Free Lance Ninjas SXSWedu Video Interview

There are so many reasons we like Flinja. First off, their name is short for Freelance Ninja, and any startup with the word Ninja in it rocks. Secondly they are connecting college students with ways to make money by sharing their service as free-lancers with college alumni.

The startup, founded by Rebecca Bahr and Victor Young, is a market place for current college students to find free-lance employment opportunities from alumni. Bahr says they’ve pivoted several times. When they first set out on the free lance ninja concept the platform was closed to each students actual school. Well Bahr, who went to college in Montreal, found it hard to find people to connect with when she needed a service provider in California.

Now, any college student can be a service provider to any college graduate from any school in their network.

Students are utilizing Flinja to offer videography services, photography services, wedding planning services, tutoring in a variety of subjects and anything else that they could do for others for a little money on the side (legal of course).

The hope is that the alumni or college graduates that hire the students as freelancers may be a gateway to more stable employment.

The Flinja marketplace is self contained. When a college graduate is looking for a service provider they can search through Flinja, see a provider (students) feedback and ratings, set up the service, agree to pay and actually finish the transaction. Flinja takes a small percentage from the person hiring, not from the college student.

UCLA was the first school to adopt the Flinja platform. Students are being hired as videographers, editors and tutors.

Flinja is a finalist in the LAUNCHedu competition at SXSWedu in the higher education category. They will appear in the showdown later this week.

Check out our video interview with Bahr below and for more info visit flinja.com

We’ve got more SXSWedu coverage here.

Startup Weekend Education Movie Debuts At SXSWedu

sxswedu,startup weekend edu,startup weekend,startup weekend movie,sxsw,sxsw13

(l to r: Chapman Snowden (Kinobi/Startup Weekend EDU), Adam Stelle (COO Startup Weekend), Vinny Verma (1887 Films) photo: NIM 2013)

Startup Weekend Education is a 54 hour long event that utilizes the same startup hacking weekend format that traditional Startup Weekend events use. They’ve been held all over the country, including Silicon Valley, New York, DC, and Florida. There have also been several successful Startup Weekend Education events overseas.

The movie, produced by Vinnny Verma of 1887 films, chronicles Startup Weekend Education events in Silicon Valley and New York City.

In New York, the focal point is Kevin Tame, who taught 8th grade math at Booker T Washington middle school in Baltimore Maryland. The idea for his startup Student Dashboard, is that kids don’t like to spend time logging into all the various apps and platforms they need for school.

Tame felt that if he could simplify the process he would give back a much needed commodity, time, and not only to the students but the teachers as well.

On the west coast the film turns to Rob Schwartz a 16 year educator and principal. His problem was that students and teachers need better ways to produce and consume content. His startup, MySciHigh went on to win the Silicon Valley event and is now in 35 schools across the country.

The movie was screened as part of the SXSWedu event at the legendary Alamao Draft House and Theater.

Startup Weekend’s COO Adam Stelle, Verma and Chapman Snowden of Kinobi and Starutp Weekend Edu all participated in a panel discussion after the viewing.

One thing that caught my eye was during the film Tame had said that he had gone to the NY event only to work on his project and didn’t want to work on any other project. This actually goes against the grain of traditional Startup Weekend events. We’ve been to over 60 Startup Weekend’s and at those events entrepreneurs are encouraged to stay and participate whether their idea is picked for building or not.

Stelle explained that at Startup Weekend Edu the hackers are actually teachers, and many come in specifically to get help “scratching their own itch.” Verma said that he had actually spent time contemplating this issue and went with it because if fit with Tame’s character.

Regardless, the movie was a great look at what happens when you get people together working on common problems.

“We’re too concerned about talking about the problem than real world action,” Tame said in the film in regards to teaching. He went on to say that at the Startup Weekend edu event people were talking about problems and solutions.

Tame’s team didn’t have a designer or a developer. Tame and a partner ended up hacking together the entire idea, and a pitch deck with one minute to spare.

Tame has transitioned from a Teach For America corps teacher to the organizations Director of Design and Technology, moving to this position in part because of his involvement with Startup Weekend edu.

The movie, which is finally edited down and ready to go, will be online and shown at several startup events across the country.

To find out more about how to host a Startup Weekend event in your city visit startupweekend.org

Find more of our Startup Weekend coverage here.

Cristin Frodella Talks Google Science Fair At SXSWedu

As part of the programming in the Google Classroom at SXSWedu Google’s Cristin Frodella spent some time talking about the globally known Google Science Fair.

Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google said it best last year when addressing a crowd about the Google Science Fair “We’re all scientists here.” Many of Google’s employees are engineers and scientists and spent many a day developing science fair projects to show off at school with a poster board and a cool experiment.

Through Google’s global reach, widely respected brand and technology Google has taken the science fair online and across the world. The contest, now headed into it’s third year, reaches high school aged students across the globe and brings the top 15 to Google’s campus to show off their world changing science experiments to a group of distinguished scientists and judges.

Of course the students also enjoy the thrill of being not only in Google’s campus but visiting surrounding science related places as well. Last year for instance, the students spent some time at the Tesla world headquarters.

Check out the video below where Frodella gives some background on The Google Science Fair.

We’ve got more from SXSWedu here.

See The Evolution Of SXSW In An Infographic

We’re gearing up to start covering SXSW on-site. Our coverage actually begins tomorrow at SXSWedu. The educational shoulder festival is gaining momentum and is now a full four days of programming. We’re covering SXSWedu and SXSWi this year. We’ve covered their other big shoulder event SXSWeco in 2011 and 2012.

This is my 12th year attending SXSW. It started for me as going for the music festival when I worked in radio. I’ve spent the last four years covering SXSW as a tech journalist, the last two as nibletz the voice of startups everywhere else.

SXSW began in 1987 as an alternative music festival. In it’s inaugural year there were 700 registered attendees. Last year the music festival portion of SXSW saw over 12,000 registered attendees and since 2010 SXSW interactive has drawn more attendees than the music festival. SXSW music is the largest festival of it’s kind with more than 2500 “official” performers and over 100 venues participating.

The team at activ8social, a creative marketing agency that specializes in social media put together an awesome infographic that shows how SXSW has evolved since 1987. They humbly suggest that the infographic is awesome and after checking it out, especially for along time attendee, I must concur.

The highlights of the infographic and activ8social’s research are:

Since 2010, SXSW Interactive has boasted more attendees than SXSW Music.
Most of the attendees of SXSWi are between the ages of 21-40.
More than 50% of the attendees work in creative or management.
People at SXSWi have deep pockets! A quarter of the attendees have a combined household income of $100,000-200,000.

Some of the biggest names in startups have launched at SXSW. Most notable are probably Twitter and Foursquare in the past few years. However, the 2006 SXSWi keynote panel included Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia and Craig Newmark the founder of Craigslist. The infographic also highlights Sarah Lacy’s biggest interview faux pax when in 2007 the audience turned on her while interviewing Mark Zuckerberg. In fact, her now good friend, contributor and confidant Paul Carr actually spoke very critically of her during that particular interview.

We’ve got more SXSW13 coverage for you here.

See These LAUNCHedu K-12 Startup Finalists At SXSWedu

South By Southwest’s education event, sxswedu, continues to grow. This year they have four full days of programming beginning today and running through Thursday March 7th. SXSWedu takes place at the Austin Convention Center and surrounding hotels, and is quickly gaining popularity.

While many startups are participating in SXSWinteractive, EdTech or educational startups are launching at sxswedu as part of the new LAUNCHedu event. Startups in the LAUNCHedu finals will be presenting at the Hilton Austin Downtown in room 404 throughout the event. The complete schedule of presenting startups in the LAUNCHedu Startup Showcase can be found here.

Here are the 2013 LAUNCHedu K-12 Finalists from the SXSWedu website:

Actively Learn

activelylearn.com
Reading is the bedrock of education, but two-thirds of eighth graders cannot understand what they read. Actively Learn has created a reading environment to teach students to be advanced readers. Educators are empowered with tools for personalized instruction and analytics of student learning within the context of Common Core standards.

Classroom, Inc.

classroominc.org
Classroom, Inc. prepares struggling middle and high school students for success in and beyond school. Acting as bankers, editors, and lawyers in our workplace simulations, students use their academic, critical-thinking, and 21st century skills to solve authentic problems.

Clever

getclever.com
Founded by a teacher tired of chaos in the computer lab, Clever solves a common frustration with educational software: logins. Clever automatically syncs student accounts from a school’s information system (SIS) into programs students use. Over 50 companies and 3,000 schools use Clever to make their classroom software “just work”.

Common Curriculum

commoncurriculum.com
Common Curriculum is building the Google Docs of education. Our free site lets teachers collaboratively plan units and lessons while aligning them to the Common Core. Teachers and districts will be able to sell their work through our online marketplace or purchase new material by dragging it into their plans.

DigitWhiz

digitwhiz.com
DigitWhiz is all about making sure kids master foundational math skills in a fun and effective way. We evaluate, prescribe individualized games and guide kids to master the skills they need. Play on desktops or iPad. Teacher-built and kid approved!

Duckie Deck

duckiedeck.com
At Duckie Deck we provide smiles. Over eight million toddlers played our games and smiled. We teach things that are important for their future, things that matter to their parents. We explain why sharing with others is so important. Why we should brush our teeth and what does friendship mean.

instaGrok

instaGrok.com
instaGrok is a research engine: we make it incredibly simple to discover, learn, and share information. Users explore graphical concept maps that show how ideas connect. They can also customize the maps (with key facts, links, and images) and then share them with friends, colleagues, and classmates.

Learnsprout

learnsprout.com
LearnSprout simplifies systems integration and reveals key insights on student performance and engagement with the first universal API to pull live data from leading student information systems. Free to schools and districts, LearnSprout is the easiest and most secure, FERPA compliant method for integrating an SIS within the edtech ecosystem.

Slate Science

slatescience.com
Slate Science is transforming mobile devices into interactive, adaptive learning platforms for K12 STEM education. Our platform enables rapid, multi-platform development of modular learning units, designed to offer performance-based, student-specific learning experiences. The SlateMath CC-compatible portfolio includes hundreds of recombinant learning units, each imparting a specific mathematical skill or concept.

Teaching Channel

teachingchannel.org
Teaching Channel is a community of educators focused on self-improvement that attracts 250,000 users/month. Visitors to the website find a high-quality video library – featuring exemplar teachers – paired with intuitive annotation tools. With TchTeams, Teaching Channel’s private collaboration platform, schools and districts can now enable their teachers to learn together.

ThinkCERCA

thinkcerca.com
ThinkCERCA is a Chicago-based company passionately committed to improving the quality of K-12 education. Developed by a team of nationally recognized literacy experts, the online platform allows teacher teams to design, deliver, and assess lessons using the CERCA argumentation framework. The expert lesson library delivers rigorous, personalized learning across disciplines.

zondle

zondle.com
A games-based learning web and mobile platform grounded in neuroscience that enables teachers and students to create, play and share games to support teaching and learning. User-created questions (multiple formats, any language, any age group) can be combined with multiple casual games for students to play and practice.

We’ve got much more SXSW13 coverage here!

Tech Cocktail Hosting SXSW Startup Celebration Saturday March 9th

Tech startup blog and event powerhouse Tech Cocktail is hosting a startup celebration at South By Southwest 2013. If you’ve ever been to one of TechCocktail’s events you know they do a fantastic job of connecting startups with the public, the press and investors. The SXSW Startup Celebration won’t be any different.

This year TechCocktail is teaming up with CEA (the folks who put on CES) and .co.

The event kicks off Saturday March 9th at 7pm and runs until 11pm at The Stage on Sixth (508 East 6th Street, Austin TX). It runs until 11pm.

Frank Gruber and the team at TechCocktail know how to throw together an event and they also know how to find some of the best startups in the world. This years event will feature 30 great startups that will be named shortly.

This is the fourth year for TechCocktail’s big event at SXSW. Some of the startups that have showcased in years past at this event include: FitOrbit, Foodspotting, Khush, Mobile Roadie, Personal, Storify, Udemy, Tango, SaneBox, Sawbuck, Sifteo, Sonar, Sphero, Stitch Labs, Votizen, and many more. So you know this years event will be equally as epic.

Don’t take our word for it though, click here to reserve your ticket.